The duke frowned. He had come from the stables little more than an hour before. No one had said anything about Sybil’s taking out a carriage.
And yet it was not the sort of weather in which she would walk. And luncheon had been two hours before.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding curtly to his wife’s maid.
No carriage had been taken, he discovered five minutes later at the stables. The duchess had not been there.
“But I did see her this morning walking in that direction, your grace,” Ned Driscoll said, pointing toward the lake. “But that was hours ago.”
“Thank you,” the duke said.
It was starting to rain, a cold, driving rain, which quickly chilled the body even through clothing and found a cheerless path down one’s neck. The duke walked briskly toward the lake.
One of the boats was out on the water, he saw instantly—overturned and floating without direction. Something dark was caught among the reeds close to the island.
Some minutes later, from the other boat, he disentangled his wife’s body from the reeds and lifted her into the boat. He rowed back to shore, beached the boat, lifted her carefully into his arms, and began the walk back to the house.
Even soaking wet, with her clothes saturated, she weighed no more than a feather. One white and fragile hand was resting across her stomach.
His feet felt as if they were made of lead. There was a soreness in his throat and in his chest that impeded his breathing.
He had loved her once—her beauty and her light step and her sweet voice. With all of a young man’s ardor he had loved her. And he had married her and vowed to love and cherish her until death. Yet he had been unable to protect her from the sort of despair that had driven her to take her own life.
There were a few grooms outside the stables, watching his approach as if they had sensed that something was wrong. And Jarvis and a footman were somehow out at the top of the horseshoe steps as he carried his burden up them.
“Her grace has met with an accident,” he said, surprised at the firmness of his own voice. “Send Armitage and Mrs. Laycock to her room, please, Jarvis.”
“She is hurt, your grace?” The butler for once had been surprised out of his stiffness.
“Dead,” his grace said, walking past him and into the great hall and past Houghton and his brother’s valet standing there, the latter covered with the dust and mud of travel.
He carried his wife into her bedchamber and laid her carefully on her bed, straightening the sprawling limbs, arranging the wet clothing neatly, reaching out to close the dead eyes, touching the beautiful silver-blond hair, now wet and muddy. And he knelt beside the bed, took one of her hands in his, laid it against his cheek, and wept.
Wept for the death of an ardent and immature love that had been unable to bring any comfort or peace to the beloved. And wept for the woman he had taken to wife with such high ideals—the woman who had just killed herself rather than face a final illness with only his arms to comfort her. Wept for his own frailty and infidelity. For his own humanness.
He got to his feet eventually, knowing that Armitage and Mrs. Laycock had been standing behind him for some time. He turned without a word and went through the dressing room into the oval sitting room.
His steps took him to the escritoire, on which was an open letter. He should not read it, some remote part of his mind told him. It was his wife’s. But his wife was dead.
And so he bent over it, quite without curiosity. And found out thus, before Houghton and his brother’s valet had the chance to speak with him, about Lord Thomas Kent’s death in a gaming-hell brawl a few days before.
SHE KNEW, OF COURSE, THAT SHE WOULD EVENTUALLY open the letter. She had known it from the moment Daniel had set in in her hands. How could she not open it, reach out one more time to touch his life?
And yet she resented it. And hated him. For in four and a half months she had realized that she was not over the pain at all, that it would take many more months of determined living in the present before she would stop longing for him by day and aching for his arms at night.
She got up and made herself a cup of tea, drank it slowly and deliberately, looking at the letter propped against the vase the whole time.
And finally she admitted to herself that the reason for delay was not so much her resentment, her knowledge that to read his message would open all the wounds again, as something else entirely. The reason she delayed was that she knew that it would take only a few minutes to read the letter. And then there would be no more. Once again there would be the emptiness and the silence stretching out to infinity.
She set her cup and saucer aside, reached out for the letter, weighed it in her hands, lifted it to her lips, pressed it against her cheek.